Top 100 Quotes About Jean Cocteau
#2. What is style? Saying complicated things in a simple way.
Jean Cocteau
#3. Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
Jean Cocteau
#4. Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.
Jean Cocteau
#5. Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
#6. The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
Jean Cocteau
#7. Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
#8. What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart?
It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
Jean Cocteau
#9. Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Jean Cocteau
#10. Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.
Jean Cocteau
#11. One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.
Jean Cocteau
#12. Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
Jean Cocteau
#13. Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.
Jean Cocteau
#14. Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
#15. I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
#16. Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
Jean Cocteau
#17. I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Jean Cocteau
#18. I feel myself inhabited by a force or being
very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
Jean Cocteau
#19. The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
#20. Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
#21. I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Jean Cocteau
#22. There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
Jean Cocteau
#23. The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
Jean Cocteau
#24. Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
Jean Cocteau
#25. I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Jean Cocteau
#26. What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
Jean Cocteau
#27. He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
Jean Cocteau
#28. I grant you that, if you'll admit, as I do, that we are pawns of an unknown force that lives within us that dictates our actions and compels us to speak this language.
Jean Cocteau
#29. The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau
#30. It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
Jean Cocteau
#31. You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Jean Cocteau
#32. There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
Jean Cocteau
#33. See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
#34. Jacques' life was like the rooms of Montmartre women that are never cleaned because they get up at four o'clock and slip a coat over their nightgown to go downstairs and eat.
Jean Cocteau
#35. Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
#36. His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]
Jean Cocteau
#37. Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Jean Cocteau
#39. An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
#40. A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
#41. Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
Jean Cocteau
#42. Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
Jean Cocteau
#45. Imitate, and what is personal will eventually come despite yourself.
Jean Cocteau
#46. History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Jean Cocteau
#47. Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
Jean Cocteau
#48. Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
Jean Cocteau
#49. Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
#50. It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.
Jean Cocteau
#51. A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Jean Cocteau
#52. Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Jean Cocteau
#53. And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.
Jean Cocteau
#54. Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau
#55. The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
Jean Cocteau
#56. Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
#57. The only way to kill death is through photography.
Jean Cocteau
#58. Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.
Jean Cocteau
#59. The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
Jean Cocteau
#60. The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
#61. A picture neither saddening nor gladdening I fear; neither beautiful nor ugly.
Jean Cocteau
#62. It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau
#63. One should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started
Jean Cocteau
#65. One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Jean Cocteau
#66. French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
Jean Cocteau
#67. Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
#68. Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.
Jean Cocteau
#69. In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Jean Cocteau
#70. [W]e have a tendency to judge others according to ourselves.
Jean Cocteau
#71. Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.
Jean Cocteau
#72. We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
Jean Cocteau
#73. The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
Jean Cocteau
#74. It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
Jean Cocteau
#75. Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
Jean Cocteau
#76. Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
#78. People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.
Jean Cocteau
#79. Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.
Jean Cocteau
#80. Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.
Jean Cocteau
#81. Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Jean Cocteau
#82. Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
#84. Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
#85. Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
#86. Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
Jean Cocteau
#87. Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
Jean Cocteau
#89. The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
Jean Cocteau
#90. Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau
#91. Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
#92. A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau
#93. Be yourself. The world worships the original.
Jean Cocteau
#94. The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think we are choosing, and we have no choice.
Jean Cocteau
#95. Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation
Jean Cocteau
#97. Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
Jean Cocteau
#98. The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
#99. He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.
Jean Cocteau
#100. Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
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